Wild at heart

David Lynch

For those of us who have spent years guessing what David Lynch’s films and TV series mean, don’t count on him to unravel the mysteries of his work in his Sept. 28 talk: “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening,” he’s said. The filmmaker, known for his unsettling, dreamy and sometimes incomprehensible body of work (including “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive”), will be joined by quantum physicist John Hagelin, Director of Clinical Nuclear Medicine at HUP Andrew Newberg and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at the Maharishi University of Management Fred Travis to talk about “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain.” And though he’s no fan of the city, the area around the University of the Arts, which Lynch attended, inspired him to make his first feature-length film, “Eraserhead.”

BRAINIACS: The talk is at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at the Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South St. Info/registration: www.sas.upenn.edu/foxleadership.

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“As we know from the research, the performance of a large firm is due primarily to things outside the control of the top executive. … We call that luck. Executives freely admit this—when they encounter bad luck.”

—J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, on how executives can influence a company’s value. Limited research on the topic has mostly found that broader market forces often have a bigger impact on a company’s success than an executive’s actions. (The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015)